Romantic Discourse and Political Modernity

334 KAREN A. WEISMAN or the generations of Rombauers who continue the Joy atCooking. And the Feminist Companion seems somewhat uncomfortable with popular literature, especially its romance forms: while Barbara Cartland merits an entry, Judith Krantz and DanieUe Steel do not, nor does the prolific 'Miss Read,' an English institution for her fortyodd nostalgic (yet woman-centred) novels ofvillage life. (A topical entry on popular literature would be a useful addition.) The decision not to provide an index by nation or national origin is more consequential, since a novice to the field - perhaps an undergraduate searching for nineteenth-century Canadian or African American women writers - would have no point of purchase on the Feminist Companion. Surely such listings, offered provisionally, would not have typed the women as national 'icons' (x), which is the editors' concern. With the exception of this point, however, none of the above choices impairs the utility of this comprehensive and easily accessible volume. 'Companionable,' as its name suggests, it is designed to encourage browsing and bedtime reading, and destined to become a well-thumbed classic on the reference shelf. Romantic Discourse and Political Modernity KAREN A. WEISMAN Richard Bourke. Romantic Discourse altd Political Modernity: Wordsworth, the Intellectual and Cultural Critique New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf 1993. ix, 353. US $39.95 Romanticism, perhaps more thananyotherperiodized culturalidiom, defines a site of contention. But if the anti-authoritarianism and oppositional nature of late eighteenth / early nineteenth-century literature has always been axiomatic, then resistance to Romanticism - resistance to Romanticism's modes of resistance - has been no less an integral part of the landscape. In fact, it is the landscape as constituted site of recompense which serves at once as the chief value te1U1 of the age and the most convenient rallying cry to its demystification. Critiques such as Richard Bourke's locate an interesting impasse in this regard, for they may be read as the excess deposit of a contemporary culture saturated with persisting Romantic norms: in Romantic Discourse and Political Modernity Romanticism is constructed as a period in history in which politics became displaced into scenes of recuperative rest, usually figured in a benevolent landscape offering itself to a social community of rooted self-actualized types. Bourke, that is, presupposes that Wordsworth is as unnuanced as his worst and his mos~ pioqs cri~cs are, and this is the ground from which he seeks to unshroud Romanticism's political and spiritual vacuity. Of 'Tintern Abbey,' for example, he insists upon 'its failure to cooperate with itself in the production of a reliable community of trust - its failure in the realm of synthesis, its incapacity to coordinate the elements of a prospective political narrative,' Bourke challenges Wordsworthianism by first insisting that it be taken entirely at its uncritical word, arguing that 'reparation, to the extent that ROMANTIC DISCOURSE AND POLITICAL MODERNITY 335 it may be said to denominate the impulse behind Wordsworth's undertaking, is a structural occurrence which is political in its orienl:ation but which is also fundamentally problematic.' At some level, perhaps, all 'reparation' is always political in its orientation, but as an unquestioned axiom of critical engagement, the statement raises some unsettling issues increasingly pervasive within our current cultural moment. There hover two premises - first;, that Wordsworth saw poetry as therapy and therapy as necessarily politically inflected, and second, that it is high time we resist so much solace offered to us in so much inadvertent bad faith. At times, such indignation reduces Wordsworth to a parody of himself, or at least to a parody of some construals of him: the 1793 Reign of Terror got you down? Take one impulse from a vernal wood and call Nat~JTe in the morning. Proceeding on such assumptions, the author then traces the progress of the Romantic project in Victorian and twentieth-century society, concluding that the marginalized, impotent intellectual is the legacy of a Romantic inheritance which could not ultimately reconcile the conflicting demands of civic responsibility with vatic longings. Can we be sick and tired of being told to be sick and tired? Better yet, can we resist an orthodoxy which is primarily putative? Richard Bourke's book appears in the midst of a long...